Folks, the online world has changed considerably over the last 24 months. You’ve no doubt noticed a sea change in the sites you rely on to get your daily news. We even have completely new ways of organizing and viewing that information thanks to technologies like RSS. Instead of only turning to mainstream media sources like CNN.com or your local affiliate news station online, many people are now enjoying (and creating) user generated content where the sites are no longer the exclusive property of large media conglomerates but instead, the content is now in the hands of the individual user.
Just a few short years ago, having a website required either a fair amount of technical know how or access to someone who also had that knowledge. Today however, it takes mere minutes to get something online that looks even better than professionally designed corporate sites from years before. This is truly a fascinating time on the web. With ‘Web 2.0′ now in full swing with the central themes being community, accessibility, tagging, sharing, etc – the web has really changed from a read only to a read/write web from the users perspective.
On the Mac platform, we’ve long had heavy weight applications for website creation like Dreamweaver and GoLive which may be beloved by the professional users, but they do come with a fairly hefty learning curve. Until recently, tools catering to the larger, less technical market on the Mac have remained somewhat limited. In January 2006, Apple surprised many people by introducing it’s iWeb product which is currently very much of a 1.0 product and has been generally not all that well received except for the most basic of uses. Thankfully, a legendary developer in the Mac community, Karelia Software arrived on the scene with their own new product aimed squarely at this market with their new web creation tool Sandvox.
Sandvox is a web development tool aimed a people who want to create really attractive, standards compliant website, regardless of their technical abilities. This is a product that you could give to your mother, while at the same time, use it for your own web based projects. Part of it’s visual allure is that various designers from around the world have contributed to the templates that come with Sandvox, allowing you to focus on creating your specific content and not on the technical details of the page layout. For anyone who has ever toiled over a modern layout created with cascading style sheets (CSS), which can be almost as fun as doing your taxes on the night of April 14th, you will quickly learn to love this approach to design. Sandvox uses the same rendering code as Apple’s own Safari browser so when you are looking at a preview of your page, you are really seeing it through the eyes of the default browser on your Mac.
You could describe creating web pages in Sandvox as simplistic, but that hardly does it justice. Sandvox does so much behind the scenes that really hides the complexity of creating a modern website from the user, yet it still makes the raw code accessible to you (in the Pro version at least) should you have the need to manually tweak and adjust the raw HTMl on your own. With many interesting features included in the product, you can learn a lot about website creation just sitting down with Sandvox and trying to create something. You are bound to find countless goodies in the product that really do make creating a site a lot of fun. As someone who’s created websites since literally 1995, learning yet another tool isn’t something that usually gets me too excited but after a few hours with Sandvox, it reminded me of the way I felt the first time that I used iMovie and how empowered I felt with a tool like that at my disposal. Sandvox does for the web, what iMovie did for home movies for many Mac users.
Another feature that I absolutely loved about Sandvox is the fact that it was designed from the ground up to be a pluggable system, meaning that all of the various elements that make up the program are interchangeable and swappable. One such area that particularly stands out for me here was it’s data sources. What this means is that Sandvox comes with several modules for dealing with different types of information and data. The real world use is that Sandvox knows that when you drag in a specific type of file, Sandvox will recognize it and take the appropriate actions based on the context.
For example, you drag in a Microsoft Word file and it instantly recognizes it so that you want to create a text based page. It then begins to strip out any unneeded bits of information from the Word file, all while preserving (or perhaps converting is a more accurate term) the styles and layout from the original Word file as it makes the transition from a desktop word processor file to a web page. For anyone who has ever had to ‘prepare MS Word files for the web’ using other tools such as Dreamweaver, you know what an incredible hassle this can be. Word is notorious for including just a huge amount of extranious data that is basically meta data, describing the contents of your Word file and all of this extra data is just about useless on the web so having a tool like Sandvox take care of this for you is a big deal.
Other pluggable parts of Sandvox deal with various file types such as taking images from iPhoto and making it quite easy to construct something beautiful in a short amount of time. The same thing goes for various video formats and getting your Quicktime videos online. Being an open architecture, Sandvox also has plugins available for popular web services such as del.icio.us. Sandvox’s creators are hoping that other popular sites will take advantage of their open architecture by creating similar features such as the del.icio.us integration. The skys the limit on this one and given it’s open design, I look forward to additional functionality on this front shortly.
One of my absolute favorite features of Sandvox is it’s concept of Pagelets which is just a fantastic idea. Today’s websites are often no longer a single large piece of content but instead they are made up of bits and pieces of information that are being abstracted from multiple locations across the web. Perhaps you wish to include a snapshot from the most recent Joy of Tech cartoon on your website or blog, or perhaps include your own del.icio.us bookmarks tree in the margin of your site, Sandvox makes that incredibly easy.
It’s really common these days that popular web destinations provide you with the necessary code snippets in order to integrate their content with your site and that may be a great feature for the more technically included audience who is comfortable working with raw source code, Sandvox wanted to make this type of thing available to everyone via their pagelets technology. Sandvox supports several different types of Pagelets, including text, photos, list of links, movies, audio, RSS feeds and even some more advanced pagelet types which get implemented using an iFrame.
You can publish your Sandvox created sites on both .Mac and other regular web hosting companies. This is in stark contrast to how iWeb limits you to publishing exclusively on .Mac. This process is made quite simple using the included host setup assistant which is an actively maintained assistant designed to work with many of the most popular web hosting companies around. Be sure to check out the official Sandvox FAQ to learn more about the difference between Sandvox and Apple’s iWeb.
Sandvox comes in two flavors, a regular and a pro version with the primary difference being that the pro version enables advanced features such as Raw HTML pages/pagelets, HTML source views, and custom page headers. The regular edition is $49.00 with the pro version coming in at 79.00 which even in the pro edition, delivers an incredible value for the cost of the application. Having purchased high end web tools for over a decade now, I’m extremely impressed with everything you get in this package.
In a nutshell – despite being new to the scene, the team behind Sandvox really knows their audience and the needs of those people when it comes to the type of content they want to put online. I was pleasantly surprised to see that although the product is aimed at somewhat non-technical users, Sandox offers enough features and ease of use that even seasoned web vets might find themselves using the application on a more frequent basis. Although Sandvox is quite early in its young life, its feature set is very well thought out and well implemented.
As someone who builds websites and web applications professionally, it seems these days our clients are asking us to do more and more complex things online and the knowledge required to bring some of these concepts to life can be quite a challenge so when a tool like Sandvox comes to market, giving us a way to really put something out there that not only looks great, but also follows good web design principals and standards, you really can’t help but get excited about it. I was a Dreamweaver user since version 1.0 but tend to spend most of my time inside of Textmate doing everything by hand but when I see something as well done as Sandvox, it really gives me something to think about when it comes time to upgrade my environment the next time around.
The last thing I want to mention about Sandvox is that you can really tell the depth of experience and knowledge of its developers (Dan Wood and Terrence Talbot of Karelia Software) because they didn’t stop at just creating a great web development tool. They paid attention to their market and utilized many modern web technologies to help get the word out about their product and how to best use it. Their site features not only a blog, but also a fantastic screencast and an excellent support area that is actively maintained. A guiding principal behind the whole ‘web 2.0′ time that we live in is that the web is no longer a read-only space, but instead it has evolved into the two-way web where people are no longer just consumers of content but instead they have become co-creators. Sandvox leaves no stone unturned on the modern web, making it easy for your to also publish more advanced forms of media such as podcasts and videoblogs.
The web from just a few short years ago bears very little resemblance to the modern web of today and just as the technologies have evolved, giving us things like RSS, OMPL, tagging and blogging — we have now reached the point where the tool vendors are starting to provide normal users with incredibly powerful tools to help them get involved in the two way web. If you’ve ever been interested in doing something more than just reading what is on the web, you could do a whole lot worse that to check out Sandvox from Karelia Software. Dan and Terrence, my hats off to you — you guys did a great job on the product and I look forward to watching it evolve right alongside the modern web. You can download a free trial version (universal binary) of Sandvox from the Karelia and be sure to check out their excellent introductory screencast.
